The value of content

It struck me that making money online is not simply related to…, it IS content.
Websites you have bookmarked, are bookmarked for one reason, and one reason only… the content that they contain within.
To give a few examples of sites I visit:

Ebay. I visit ebay because it is the ONLY website on the web where I can reach a large audience with my items/content. Furthermore if I want to buy something, I will more than likely find it cheap on ebay.
BBC News. Always updated with the current news, great content, and well written: it is great to keep informed.
Dnforum. I visit dnforum because it is the ONLY website on the web where proffessional domain investors chat about their opinions on the state of the industry. This is valuable information, hence the value in the site.

Now those are only a few of the many many sites I regularly visit.. for the purpose of relating to the title of this post I refer to the final one: Dnforum.

Dnforum demonstrates perfectly the value of good content on a website. It is a forum, and it boast some of the biggest domainers in the industry as members. Of course it did not start like this, but it grew to this stage because of its content.
There is NO source on the Internet where you can get multiple views on important domain related topics, buy and sell great domains, and meet great contacts at the same time.

The first thing dnforum did right was that it chose its niche, and hit it hard.
Given this it grew exponentially, and with this the amount of content grew too. Being a forum, more users equals more content.
Such was the growth/success of the site that now any post on dnforum pretty much instantly hits the top of google within hours… anything useful you want to know about domaining…, there will probably be a dnforum page on the top results page of google.
Why is this? Simple.. the content. Original, and high quality content has earned dnforum a good pagerank, and good google spiderability (new word). Google knows that dnforum content is good, and thus it spiders it more regularly than other websites. Content, content, content !

The reason I thought of this topic again relates to dnforum. I was involved in a heated debate over at dnforum. At least 10 members were writing great argumentative content for dnforum. At least 3 of these members (myself included) have blogs. We are writing content for dnforum, and improving their rankings when we should be blogging about it, and helping our own rankings.
Dnforum is successful because there are like minded members all in one place. There are multiple sub-forums not related to domains, yet they are still popular simply because the people are already there.
They sell advertising spots for thousands of dollars monthly.. Why do people pay that? Because people are there, not just people, but people interested in a particular niche which the content has targetted.

Not only has the domain industry grown to such an extent that great domains are hard to come by (at least for cheap), but now the content market has become saturated. Content is vital in the growth of a website, but i reiterate, it MUST be unique, and original. If i were to create a domain forum now it would fail. Why? Because we have dnforum.com !